Some consider the price point of 0 to be the central operating principle of the freemium business model. And by this standard, any product for which the transaction cost is 0 (for at least some basic functionality) is, commercially, a freemium product. Pirated media and software would fall under this umbrella definition given the premise [...]
Last week I participated in a panel at Casual Connect called “Emerging Strategies to User Acquisition”. I was honored to share the stage with Jussi Laakkonen from Applifier, Stefan Bielau, Erlend Christoffersen from Supercell, Gilad Rotem from InGaming, and Billy Shipp from Iddiction. Below you’ll find a video of the entire panel, which clocks in at [...]
One innovation the freemium model brings to bear is analytics as a fundamental component of the product development lifecycle: since distribution (and thus customer adoption costs) are 0, behavioral customer data is available with enough volume to develop new streams of revenue from it. The freemium model accords an analytics team the opportunity to conceptualize [...]
Today I gave a presentation called “Big Data in Mobile Gaming: Optimizing the User Experience” at IGExpo in Tallinn, Estonia. The aim of the presentation was to provide a general overview of how an analytics system can (should?) inform the development process, with some attention paid to defining various metrics and the process of data-driven [...]
One of the most frequently levied criticisms against the free-to-play model is its low intrinsic conversion rate: most players (usually more than 95%) will never monetize. In trying to increase revenues, are developers of free-to-play games better served by increasing conversion or by increasing the average revenue per paying user (ARPPU)?
Part 1: MBAs shouldn’t do data analysis In Part 1 of this series, I argued that a centrally-hosted analytics system built on d3.js is superior to a Tableau-based (or some other proprietary tool — I use Tableau in the example because it’s probably the most prominent in the gaming industry) system because it allows for [...]
I see a lot of questions on Quora and elsewhere about prediction algorithms, many related to user conversion and retention (eg: how can I predict if a user will convert?). While modern big data and machine learning systems provide analysts with an ability to develop behavior profiles that were previously unaccessible, much of that capacity [...]
Full source code can be downloaded from GitHub For the past week, I’ve been working on a semantic prediction model involving vast amounts of Twitter data. I’ve found Twitter’s API to be cumbersome and discouraging; for whatever reason, Twitter has erected some pretty substantial barriers to downloading Tweet data. For that reason, I put a [...]
Whenever a recruiter reaches out to me about a job opening that I’ll decline, I encourage them to use me as a resource in the future if they need information about the nascent fields of analytics, big data, and quantitative marketing for games. As a result, I am asked — infrequently, but often enough to [...]
Inspired by this Quora thread, I decided to create an Infographic about the different job titles associated with Big Data. Because the Silicon Valley buzzword machine spits out more phrases than most humans can (or care to) comprehend, “Big Data” is still a mystery to the general tech-public. What’s clear to most data wranglers is a [...]
